From a technological point of view, the biggest hurdle is that the data needs to be tileable. Sebastian: Our terrain needs to be interesting but also physically plausible to avoid evoking the feeling of uncanniness in our players. Making sure the terrain, models, and textures hit the quality bar expected from a modern first-person game with plenty of polygons and texture resolution all the way up to seeing the terrain from a ship flying over it and seeing the large-scale terrain shapes and colors of the landscape. This means have to verify our work on multiple detail levels. We want to make sure the experience is visually pleasing at all these ranges and feels detailed enough. Michel: The experience we are building is one that allows players to seamlessly enjoy exploring a universe, from the surfaces of different planets, flying over vast landscapes and up into orbit, and witnessing the spectacle of seeing the planet in its entirety standing out amongst the stars. The height_validate gives us a debug view that help artists balance out the height map maximum range and midpoint. Keeping the same midpoint or ground level for all these maps ensures we always have a nice blend and transition between materials and terrains. We balance all our height maps for terrain displacement and parallax occlusion mapping around the 0.5 midpoint. We have one location where all the artists store their atlases swapping out a theme or asset type is now as simple as swapping out the atlas.Īnother example of a useful utility node is our height_validate node. Sharing and keeping track of these has become much easier. This way we can manage and maintain atlas sheets of specific themes and assets in single files. One example would be a node that will take an atlas texture with a grid of up to 25 slots and split them out into individual components to be used in other nodes like tile samplers. Even tiny repetitive tasks or often-used combinations of nodes are worth putting into their own node and shared among the team. Over the last two years, we have built up a nice library of custom nodes, tools, and utilities that make our lives easier. By tweaking the presets of these nodes throughout the graph, it has become quite easy to generate variations without rebuilding the graphs themselves.īelow are some examples of ground material sets we created with this method. This speeds up the creation process, eliminates a lot of the guess and tweak work, and maintains consistency between material sets. We have various preset nodes like these and often use a mix of different settings to create a nice blend of sand and surface types. Each of the presets has been validated in our engine and has all the outputs needed to be plugged into other graphs. This simple node holds a variety of sand types built in Substance using scan data as a reference point for our PBR values. The set will share a lot of common elements, but we use the flexibility of Substance to easily create variations.Īn example of this is the basic_sand node we have in our library. We build our terrain materials in sets, covering a range of textures describing variations that fit together for example, desert sand, going from smooth to wavy, to covered with rocks, to densely covered by rocks.
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